My host and his son welcome me to the fireside and we sit in our three easy chairs before the unconsumable blazing logs as though we had been invited back to the Senior Tutor’s rooms for a nightcap. ‘So tell us a bit about this book of yours’ seems consistent with the illusion.
‘Well,’ I say, ‘I’m starting from the premise that the previous regime, and particularly your man, have been seriously misrepresented by the Western media in several important ways, and I’d like to see if it’s possible to redress the balance. It probably isn’t.’
‘Apologetics?’ Henry asks acutely. ‘Or just plain revisionism?’
‘Certainly not apologetics. Revisionism in the strictly non-Marxist sense, and then only to the extent of re-interpreting facts rather than denying they occurred.’
‘They lied a lot about us,’ says my host with unexpected vehemence. For the first time he sounds ex-military. It may just be the gas flames, but his eyes seem to flicker with the bafflement shared by his angry fellow officers when they had begun to sense the tide of global public opinion turn against them. The mess-hall expostulations … Had they not always been on the side of the angels? Had they not been patriots, pro-democracy and anti-Communist? The trouble with the American public – civilians, of course – was that they were so lulled and insulated by their wealth and general pig-ignorance of the world they didn’t realise that saying they were committed to the crushing of global Communism was all fine and dandy, but at some level someone had to get their hands dirty in order to do the electorate’s bidding. And that meant the military. God knows, hadn’t we taken enough casualties of our own? Good men were dying in this crusade …
All this dead rhetoric I can read in my host’s eyes. It is not difficult because I’ve read the same grievance in the eyes of so many other ex-officers over the years, betrayed by a sudden lurch in public opinion. It’s that lurch they can’t get their minds around. The obvious thing is to blame it on well-intentioned liberals who hadn’t realised their strings were being pulled by the international Communist conspiracy, that diabolically scheming dark power. The more intelligent officers saw at once that this explanation wouldn’t do because it quickly spiralled into a paranoia which accepted that Washington and the media were already in Communist hands (though what about I. F. Stone, huh?). Still, the grievance is real that one moment they were blue-eyed boys winning freedom’s war and the next they’d become murderers and torturers with potential atrocity charges hanging over them at The Hague.
‘What exactly do you mean by “re-interpreting facts”?’ Henry asks me.
‘I mean a re-interpretation using the notion of cultural difference. We are not in Europe or America here. We are in Asia. But the world’s media are dominated by Western technology and Western cultural assumptions, and largely Anglophone ones at that. To interpret highly complex historical, social and political upheavals in an Asian country using the yardsticks of distant nations with completely different histories and attitudes is pointless. Anthropology knows better than that; why shouldn’t the media?’
‘Sounds reasonable. So what are you going to write about my father?’
‘I can’t say yet. It depends on what he wants to tell me.’ We both look at the handsome man sipping seventy-year-old malt whisky.
‘Well,’ says the old fellow, who is barely eighteen months my senior and approximately eleven thousand times as rich. ‘I don’t think it will make any difference what I say, will it? Sure I’ll talk to you, James. I’ll be happy to. Partly because I think you’re a fair person and I think your project also sounds fair, and partly because I believed in my friend, my President, and I still do and I’m damned if I’m going to be ashamed of it. I took an oath of loyalty and that means something to me. He has been seriously misunderstood and vilified, and if you’re giving me the chance to set the record a little straighter then I’ll take it. About my own reputation there’s probably nothing to be done.’
‘As Lord of the Tongs, you mean?’
Henry glares at me sharply.
‘Exactly,’ his father says imperturbably.
The pun on ‘tongs’ in this journalist’s phrase hints at his Chinese ancestry, at an allegation of corruption, and at the electric curling tongs which were said to have been the instrument of choice of a close brotherhood of officer-interrogators whose existence was widely rumoured but never proved. The only small weapon I have in my otherwise empty armoury, too puny to deploy unless he backs up heavy denial with legal menaces, is a notarised deposition from a US army major. My host had been seconded to Operation Phoenix in 1970, had gone to the States for counter-insurgency training, then on to Vietnam. He had been a first-rate pupil. The ex-major I interviewed outside Baltimore gave chapter and verse for a series of interrogations conducted in a hangar on the perimeter of his base near the Cambodian border. The screams from that isolated building had been audible half a mile away to mechanics working on O-1E Bird Dog spotter planes. They had glanced at each other and turned up the country & western music on their transistor radios. Shades of Edward II. By the time my host’s curling tongs were cool enough to pack away in his jungle green canvas grip, the hangar’s big doors had been opened to let out the stink of burnt hair and roast meat.
‘I’ll talk,’ he says again. ‘But I won’t whine, you understand? I naturally won’t incriminate myself but I shan’t necessarily conceal everything we did. It was dog eat dog, never forget that. We were fighting a war out there and the same was happening to us guys when we fell into their hands. And that war was linked to what was going on in the Emergency over here. I’m not going to cry crocodile tears over the past or massage my conscience in public. No, sir. What’s done is done. Certain things I regret, though not all, not by a long way. I shan’t pretend I lose sleep over it just to please your readers. I don’t.’
And this, too, requires an act of revisionism, though less cultural than temporal. One has to think one’s way back to those years when all parties to a grim war waged it with the age-old command ringing in their ears, Win At All Costs: the edict the Nuremburg trials had turned into Catch-22. Torture was like litter and pollution: one of the inseparable consequences of the hegemonic attitude. Dominant cultures did not attain or retain dominance for long without a constant level of dirty work well away from the public eye. The Oliver Norths and John Poindexters were simply the unlucky ones who made it to the witness stand, the iceberg’s tip.
We talked of other things, drank superb whisky, assessed the current President’s lamentable performance, swapped reminiscences, decided we could work with each other. When it was time for me to go my host said:
‘I hope you don’t mind if young Henry here sits in on our sessions? I have nothing to hide from my son and he’s a first-rate legal adviser. It might save you a lot of trouble later. I mean if he can spot potential libel right there, you and your publisher won’t have to worry about it at a later stage when things could get expensive.’ He smiles his easy smile. The deal.
He’s flinty at that moment but not sinister. I like and am surprised by his plain speaking. I had expected fudging and evasiveness. I had expected to be headed off by family gossip or long monologues about regional delicacies I ought to try. But no. He was more to the point than I had dared hope. The truth is I like that plain, military integrity when I meet it. It’s quite aware of all the counter-arguments but refuses to get bogged down in liberal muddiness just for the sake of sounding repentant. Actually, I’m sick of people wanting to look good. I warm to those who don’t mind looking themselves. Best of all are the ones who refuse to disavow the past.
I go back to my lodgings in his bulletproof Land Cruiser, driven by an ex-sergeant who left the army to go on driving for him. It turns out the girls who waited at the dinner table are the sergeant’s own family. They come from the same provincial town as my host, so the household is cemented together by regional, military and blood loyalties. ‘He likes you,’ the ex-sergeant confides to me as we shoot a set of red lights in the
thin traffic. ‘I can tell. He’s very suspicious of journalists. But he likes you.’
I turn things over as I try to sleep. Have I been seduced? Down here at nearly ground level the night outside is filled with ambient light and the muffled roaring of air conditioners. At two a.m. horns sound in the street, echoing off concrete walls. From somewhere at the bottom of this canyon comes the amateur wailing of karaoke bars. Exhausts blare, sweat runs into the pillow. How familiar these urban tropic nights are, unsleeping with coffee and dilemmas. Have I been talked around, softened up, compromised? Are Henry and his father still sitting in front of the gas logs, laughing at how easily they tamed the pipsqueak British writer? And should I care if they are? But they won’t be. There is no need for duplicity. My charming host is who he is and who he was, just as he admits. Someone who is straightforwardly a patriot, a paterfamilias and an interrogator, as well as many things besides. I am dramatising myself with these squeamish reflections about supping with a long spoon, about Nietzsche’s cautionary bon mot that when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you. But of course. We are the abyss. I and Jayjay and everybody else.
In the semi-dark I find myself wondering about Jayjay. I am more than ever certain he is concealing something from me. In the aftermath of an evening’s talk about military events and the unblinking necessities of battle it crosses my mind that he, too, might well have been caught up in some specific horror during the Second World War. Indeed, the more I think of this urbane man as an ex-officer, the more probable it seems that he may have been party to something squalid and unheroic that the times had made obligatory. He is very much of a generation that knew how to keep quiet, that had the strength to live daily with past deeds and old loyalties without the public confessions, self-flagellations, claims of post-traumatic stress disorder and similar modern modes of bleating. As soon as this idea comes to me a new Jayjay takes convincing shape. Not necessarily a torturer, but maybe a man who took some painful decisions wherever it was he served. (And it shows how little I really know of him that I can see him equally in flying gear bombing a Gestapo HQ in France in which there were known to be Allied prisoners, or in naval uniform ordering a surfaced U-boat to be rammed despite survivors in the water, or doing nasty things ‘out East’ with Orde Wingate’s Chindits.)
Trying to skirt a private abyss of my own, I sense a strange congruence that links together tonight’s interrogator, Jayjay and myself. The interrogator’s national identity must surely be muddled from so many years training with Americans and abetting their policies, while his son Henry is himself virtually an American. And both Jayjay and I have lived almost everywhere but in the land of our birth. This compromising of our respective roots maybe gives us all a more panoramic moral view, or at least one in which being condemnatory is no longer an option. Maybe it was the abolition of Judgement Day that led the internationally righteous to set up their war crimes tribunals as though the crimes of peace were already well accounted for. I have long lost all interest in issues of public guilt, with the whole fake-dignified panoply of robes and editorials. These days I am only ever gripped by the skewed inheritance of our common lot, by private pacts and secret expediencies, by the unassuaged greeds and griefs that precede court and clinic.
The karaokes wail, the sweat trickles down. My own past keeps me from sleep. In turning and turning on this vile bed I sense the hooks off which I am trying to wriggle. Only one hook, really, when it comes down to it. Lucky the man who is not haunted by a vignette from a far-off war in this selfsame part of the world, an episode burned into the brain. The main protagonists are all dead. But the journalist-adventurer-witness tosses and sweats and is forever condemned to re-live the scene. He was young then, but so were the dead who might yet be alive (the tireless conscience insists) had it not been for his crucial failure of nerve at the one moment when they might still have stood a chance. Unlikely, it’s true, but there’s never any telling. And now there is nothing but telling, the private nag of blame. Over and over again his courage fails, ducking for cover, and over and over again they die. It is all far in the past, one lost incident among uncounted such, and no-one else cares or even knows any more. But it concerns memory as much as it does conscience. Jayjay was right when he alluded disparagingly to that Buddhist amnesia necessary in order to live eternally in the present. By disenfranchising the past it involves damage to the moral self. Besides, I think, why privilege the ever-skidding moment when now is no more real than then, and certainly not to Jayjay and myself? Our pasts float ever before our eyes like retinal debris or the hair in the gate of an old cine projector, fluttering to betray as film the scene one is thinking so real.
Well, whatever old Jayjay may eventually confess to he is safe from my judgement. Not only do I have a secret of my own from time of war but he did much of his best living before I was even born, when the world was another place. The past really is a different country, with its own language and customs. One blunders about in it with fading maps and dog-eared phrasebooks, baffled by dialect and rates of exchange, all censure suspended …
The sky outside seems lighter. I wonder how my bees are getting on.
*
Two months went by. Every so often I would quit the roaring Asian capital for the provinces with the urgency of an underwater swimmer coming up for air and bursting into sunlight. Being down among the denizens unquestionably had its fascination. Being made privy to things about which most people remain mercifully ignorant was gripping, but you held your breath. At such depths you were among essentials. You cleared your mind of cultural baggage and moral outrage. You acknowledged the muscles and teeth of survival. Sharks, too, were beautiful. But it was still airless down there, a place for quick visits, not for lingering in. When I could stand it no longer I would surface and take the familiar series of buses and ferries until once again I was pushing open my creaking bamboo door and dumping my bag on the unswept earth floor. Within minutes a row of eyes would show above the powdery windowsill and on the sill itself a row of little white fingernails. Had I brought presents back with me? Candy? (for this was a culture where returning travellers are expected to bring gifts for unfortunate stay-at-homes). The sheer relief of innocent normality was itself a kind of gift.
Here beneath the mango tree I worked up my notes, savouring the ambient smells that drifted through the hut’s glassless window and permeable walls. Cooking fires, tropical rot; the smoke of a fire for roasting piles of halved coconuts so that the meat shrinks away from the shell like curls of brown oily leather to be further dried as copra. The smell of the muddy track drying in the midday sun; the scent of afternoon rains remoistening dried earth. The world of air-conditioned condominiums and gas log fires was centuries away. Cultural baggage and moral outrage remained clutter. The day-care-centre roof stayed unrepaired. The yielding obduracy, the social complexity, the ripple effects of any action taken in a community this small led to a familiar resigned inertia. I went fishing instead, split and salted the catch, laid it on the edge of the thatched roof to dry in the sun.
I used to wonder how I knew when my time was up in my various bunk-holes. Was it because I suddenly felt apprehensive about my bees? Was it because I worried that my house in Italy might have fallen victim to storm damage or thieves, all alone up there among the forests? Not really. Things that far away can take care of themselves. No, the moment for leaving was determined quite arbitrarily by the return flight stipulated as part of a cut-price ticket. In a corner of the hut I found my shoes, now a pretty blue-green with mould. I shook bulbous spiders out of my trouserlegs and brushed worm dust from a shirt. The very casualness of farewells to friends and neighbours, as though we were saying goodbye before going to town for the day, were earnests of return. The bamboo door (through which a determined child could force an entry, let alone a determined adult) was padlocked, the backward glance resisted. The hut, the mango tree, the village itself dwindled to a dot beside the sea, which became ocean, which in due course turned in
to the Mediterranean and after a while led to my standing on another of my doorsteps fumbling with a key that felt strange.
It was nearly a fortnight before I had the time and inclination to contact Jayjay once more. There was the usual alp of mail to deal with, the normal week’s adjustment to a different daily regime and sundry chores. Above all there were the bees to see to. It was a bad time to have been away because some of them would have swarmed in late April and I was resigned to finding a diminished community. After so many weeks wearing my investigative writer’s disguise it was a great relief to slip on a beekeeper’s mask. I stuffed some smouldering sacking into the smoker and went into each of the hives, softly removing the roof and crown board and slowly peeling back the polythene quilt, puffing a little smoke under the corner and giving an additional small puff here and there as more of the bee-laden frames were exposed. As usual I had the quick image of a brain surgeon lifting off a portion of skull. One by one I raised, inspected and gently replaced the frames, revelling in their smell, their orderly packed cells, the bees moving across the surface. Then back went the quilt and the crown board with great care lest any bees be crushed beneath its edge. This was not just because I felt tenderly towards my bees but also for reasons of self-interest. Squashing a bee breaks its venom sac and the smell of venom stimulates attack, which is why it is a mistake to kill an annoying bee. And once you do get stung, other bees will home in on exactly the same place to plant their stings. So your movements are slow and deliberate and bees that settle on your hands can simply be shaken off into the hive before you put the lid back on.
In this way I worked through the hives, finding nothing amiss. The piece of sacking in the smoker lasted just long enough, a reward for sparingness. Smoke is a blessing and one could hardly work without it, but it should be used minimally. Until I began keeping bees I had assumed it was used as an anaesthetic to stun and subdue the wretched animals, but that is not the principle at all. A whiff of smoke acts as an alarm to which the bees respond instinctively by staying on the comb to fill themselves with a three-day emergency supply of honey. What one is aiming for is placid, gorged bees too good-tempered to go flying around looking for an intruder to sting. It is panicky and inelegant beekeeping to use too much smoke. It does the bees no good and can even taint the honey.
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